t be a fit person to
invoke from the dead. "Yes," said B----, "provided he would agree to
lay aside his mask."

We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned
as a candidate: only one, however, seconded the proposition.
"Richardson?"--"By all means, but only to look at him through the
glass-door of his back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the
most extraordinary contrast that ever was presented between an author
and his works), but not to let him come behind his counter lest he
should want you to turn customer, nor to go upstairs with him, lest he
should offer to read the first manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison,
which was originally written in eight and twenty volumes octavo, or
get out the letters of his female correspondents, to prove that Joseph
Andrews was low."

There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any
one expressed the least desire to see--Oliver Cromwell, with his fine,
frank, rough, pimply face, and wily policy;--and one enthusiast, John
Bunyan, the immortal author of the Pilgrim's Progress. It seemed that
if he came into the room, dreams would follow him, and that each
person would nod under his golden cloud, "nigh-sphered in Heaven," a
canopy as strange and stately as any in Homer.

Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the
greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by J. F----. He presently
superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then
it was on condition that he should act in tragedy and comedy, in the
play and the farce, Lear and Wildair and Abel Drugger. What a _sight
for sore eyes_ that would be! Who would not part with a year's income
at least, almost with a year of his natural life, to be present at it?
Besides, as he could not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory
things, what a troop he must bring with him--the silver-tongued Barry,
and Quin, and Shuter and Weston, and Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, of
whom I have heard my father speak as so great a favourite when he was
young! This would indeed be a revival of the dead, the restoring of
art; and so much the more desirable, as such is the lurking scepticism
mingled with our overstrained admiration of past excellence, that
though we have the speeches of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the
writings of Goldsmith, and the conversation of Johnson, to show what
people could do at that period, and to confirm the universal testimony
to th